Saturday, October 6, 2012

Zombies
are the hottest thing right now.From
movies to television you can find them everywhere.There is even a series of children's books
based on a zombie theme.Many haunted
houses include zombies within their repertoire of characters.On Saturday, October 6, 2012 we went to a zombie
themed haunted trail known as Zombie Village located at Powers Pavilion in
Newnan, Georgia.For the fun of it we
took a friend of ours with us who hasn't been to any type of haunted attraction
in eight years, so her opinions were of great use to us in evaluating
them.It can often be helpful to try to
view a haunt through someone else's eyes, and this is certainly the case for
Zombie Village.

We love
to share our experiences with haunted houses so that others can enjoy them, but
we also love to talk with haunts about their ideas and share what we have seen
in our many visits to other locations.This would hopefully result in haunts which are constantly evolving and
taking in the ideas that their guests share with them so that they become
better over time.Yes, we realize that
this doesn't always work and we sometimes don't get to speak with anyone at the
site of the attraction so that we can learn more about them and share our thoughts
with them.We aren't experts, not by any
stretch of a creative imagination, but we like to think that a great haunt
wouldn't care who you are and would listen to every visitor as though they were
the most important people to come through all season long.It is never our desire to discourage visitors
from attending a haunt, unless there is a very strong reason (which has only
really ever happened once and we didn't release the name of the haunt).Everything that we say is meant to help
better inform visitors to haunts so that they can make wise choices, based on
their own needs, as to where to spend their hard earned money.

Now
that our disclaimer of the night has been said let us express that this is what
we might consider a starter haunt, sort of like a starter home.Our friend had an okay time and definitely
had a few scares, though she did feel somewhat disappointed in the end.The three young men who were also with us had
a rather skittish member in there group who jumped at anything, sort of like a
chihuahua running from a leaf. We didn't
have those experiences ourselves, so it is hard to understand them.We did encounter a woman who was turning in
laser guns as she and what appeared to be her husband and son were
leaving.She said, "It would be
worth it if you get a gun."They do
have an additional $5 charge to get a gun so that you can shoot the zombies if
you want to.Her phrase actually made us
wonder if it might not be worth it without the gun.Scary thought.

There
were a couple of things that stood out to us before we even made it past the
first scene of the trail.The staff kept
telling people that there was a three minute time between the groups being sent
in, but we thought that it seemed longer.Smart girl that our friend is she suggested timing it on the cell phone
to see. Sure enough it was almost always closer to six minutes between groups
going in.When we did enter the first
scene we watched a video with some of the rules and it told us not to run,
however when the scare for the scene concluded we were yelled at multiple times
to run.Really?Can we get a decision going here as to what
they actually want?Why not tell us to
get out or get a move on, or honestly anything other than run since you told us
not to run in the video less than a minute before?On top of those we also had seen on Facebook
where they said that it was about a 45 minute walk through the trail, however
we timed that as well (since the timer was there) and found that we were back
at our car in under 30 minutes.That
thirty minutes included waiting in two different lines and walking to the
parking area afterwards.These may seem
like petty things to point out to some, but to us we see a pattern emerging
here and it concerns us.

We feel
that this was a starting point for them to grow from with this having been
their first year in business, and we sincerely hope that they do learn and
grow.We expect that they will spend
some time training their actors, especially about how to stay in character.Speaking about the appearance of the actors
would be useless, since you are in the dark and really can't see much of their
character's look anyway.It felt as
though something were missing for us, but we can sincerely say that there were
others who enjoyed themselves.Our guest
reviewer did have fun and jumped several times, as well as tossed out a good
scream or two.She hasn't been to a
haunt in years, so this was a good way to get back into the fun of the
Halloween season.Since we can't really
rate Zombie Village on anything other than our own opinions we scored them with
one severed head out of five.We welcome
your opinions if you go and we wish them the best as they grow and develop more
of their haunt over time.